Question

I found an example in MSDN for string to datetime conversion. But it doesn’t work, fall into the catch(). Why this code block doesn’t work?

DateTime dateValue;
      string dateString = "2/16/2008 12:15:12 PM";
      try {
         dateValue = DateTime.Parse(dateString);
         Console.WriteLine("'{0}' converted to {1}.", dateString, dateValue);
      }   
      catch (FormatException) {
         Console.WriteLine("Unable to convert '{0}'.", dateString);
      }

Answer 1

You’re using whatever the current culture’s idea of a date/time format is – and my guess is that you’re in a culture where the day normally comes before the month.

If you know the format, I’d typically use the invariant culture and TryParseExact – definitely don’t use Parse and a catch block; either use TryParseExact or TryParse. In this case:

if (DateTime.TryParseExact(dateString, "M/d/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt",
                           CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, 0, out dateValue))
{
    Console.WriteLine("'{0}' converted to {1}.", dateString, dateValue);
}
else
{
    Console.WriteLine("Unable to convert '{0}'.", dateString);
}

If you don’t know the input format, but you know the culture to use, I’d just use DateTime.TryParse with the appropriate culture.